2009-02-05

Time to move on

There were a lot of rumors around me resigning in August/September last year. I didn't back then want to comment on the rumors, because I was still trying to work something out with Sun. Now I can finally describe a bit of what was going on.

In this case, the rumors had some elements of truth to them. I had told management that I thus would be submitting my resignation immediately as I strongly believed that the 5.1 release was not ready and that those problems needed to be fixed before it went GA. This action, together with other peoples´ efforts, did have the wanted effect and I made an agreement with Sun´s upper management to not initiate my resignation but instead stay around for three more months to help Sun work out things in MySQL Development and also give Sun a chance to create an optimal role for me within Sun.

The three months did stretch out to seven months, and the changes I had hoped Sun would apply to in the MySQL Database group to fix our development and community problems did not happen fast enough.

Sun and I concluded in the end that I have much higher chances of achieving my goals outside of Sun, so it's just better to swallow the bitter apple, go out and get things going. We parted in good terms and we both expect to continue to do business and work together.

The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow.

I still think that Sun was the best possible buyer for MySQL and I feel sad that things didn't work out together. Sun has a lot of good things going on and I hope that they will continue their path to create and promote Open source. I will be available for Sun in helping them with their goals in the Open source space.

So what will Monty Program Ab and I be working on?

Monty Program Ab will be a true open source company, with the additional goal of being a smaller family oriented company (10-30 employees) where everyone can be owners of the company, where we care about our employees and strive to have fun together and share the profit we create. You can find more about this at: http://zak.greant.com/hacking-business-models

Some of the Maria team members will follow me and some will stay in Sun. The plan is to continue to work on the Maria project more or less as before. The main difference from before is that the Maria project and it's mailing lists will move to launchpad and we will start using free-node for our IRC communications (channel #maria). Maria 1.5 (the crash safe version of MyISAM) is now in beta and we hope to get binaries out soon. We have already started working on Maria 2.0 features (full transactional release) and performance issues. From my side there will be a small time delay in the Maria development (one-two months delay in the final release) as I have to set up things in the new company.

Monty Program Ab will start working actively with the MySQL community to allow stable patches to the MySQL-5.1-Maria tree and create an active community around this tree. We will also do some restructuring of the MySQL code to make it simpler, faster and with fewer bugs.

One shouldn't regard the MySQL-Maria tree as a fork but as a branch as we intend to pull in all changes from the official tree to the MySQL-Maria tree; Some of the changes will probably be reworked but we will do our best to ensure that for the end user they should look and feel the same.

Monty Program Ab will also do NRE (Non-recurring engineering) to customers on MySQL and Maria and put this work into the MySQL-Maria tree. (Shameless promotion: If you want something to be done, fixed or changed in the MySQL server, please contact me at "monty at askmonty.org" for an offer).

In addition, I will continue to work with and invest in disruptive technology start Up companies that do open source and community products. (Another shameless promotion : If you think you have an unique business idea in the open source space, contact me on "monty at openoceancapital.com"!)

I am also working on opening a new kind of restaurant that will use databases to achieve a better customer experience. (Expect a special discount for database developers!). More about this later...

I guess I joined MySQL too late to really get to know you personally, but I want you to know I have always admired your achievements, and found your uncompromising attitude to be very courageous.

I wish you the best of luck in your new endeavors, I am sure you will prosper from them. I know you are honest when you say you will remain actively involved in improving Maria and the MySQL server, and I am sure there is a bright future ahead for both you and MySQL. But obviously, your leave is an event of great importance, and I can't help feeling a little sad about it.

Anyway - thanks for the great product - to me, it will largely remain your brainchild. It's impressive how far you managed to take it and you will always be rembered for it.

I think that's sort-of-great news. It's nice to see someone stand up and point out how screwed up the MySQL release model is.

I had high hopes Sun would fix some things when they bought MySQL. They should have worked harder to listen, do the right thing, and keep you on.

I was glad to see Sun push a release out (the release cycle is horrible). The state of that release left some things to be desired, so yeah.. I think you and Sun both have relevant arguments, and really should have worked something out.

I accidently lost a comment where someone said that "Selling MySQL to Sun was the worst thing that could have happened as Sun started to close up things get more revue"

What really happened was that MySQL server and development started to "close up" long before because the MySQL management thought that would be right path to quickly generate more money as a part of going public.

Sun has tried to get MySQL to open up since we joined Sun, but the current managers of the Sun database group has largely ignored this so far.

The basic thought from Sun has largely been: "The MySQL group is doing fine, lets leave them alone" instead of taking actions and fix the things that critically needed fixing.

The big news this week, the epoch-shattering event, is of course, Monty Widenius’s departure from Sun, his time to move on. Perhaps not much of a surprise, given his famously underwhelmed response to 5.1’s GA release. But Monty, your thunder has been stolen!

"Sun has tried to get MySQL to open up since we joined Sun, but the current managers of the Sun database group has largely ignored this so far."So, do you mean that the acquisition of Sun was supposed to fix the problems that led you to leave, but it didn't?

"The basic thought from Sun has largely been: "The MySQL group is doing fine, lets leave them alone" instead of taking actions and fix the things that critically needed fixing."In other words, the Sun acquisition was a chance to fix the MySQL problems that was unfortunately lost, and now it is too late.

I was very happy that it was Sun who bought us, because I thought they being an engineering driven company would very soon understand the problems that we had in MySQL engineering and help us fix them. It still hasn't happened and and in the end I got tired of waiting. As can bee seen from my blog, I think that I did more than was expected from me when it came to wait for them...

I didn't have any agreement with Sun, so I could have left any time. I just wanted to do the decent thing and stay and help Sun with MySQL development and also help expand their open source participation. Now I hope to be able to help them from the outside instead.

A database-powered restaurant sounds interesting ;)In the past I have developed anymeal which uses MySQL to store a large number of recipes (shameless self promotion on my part). If I find the energy to do it, I may do a rewrite in Ruby though. Handling the data and the user input in C++ is somewhat cumbersome. There also is grecipe-manager manager which happens to be written in Python.